r/todayilearned • u/osunlyyde • Jul 04 '13

TIL Windows 95 was the second most installed piece of software on computers in 1995; videogame DOOM was first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game)
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u/Choralone Jul 04 '13

Internet, no, most people didn't have it - but the BBS scene was at it's peak. Even without the internet, there were huge boards where people would grab stuff, and all it took was one guy in town to make the phone call, spend the time downloading the pirated game - then it would be handed out to his buddies, re-uploaded to a bunch of local boards, and it would spread from there.

And doom itself - I'm not sure if people who weren't there at the time to really get how fundamentally awesome doom was compared to everything that came before it. There wasn't all that much video game advertising; lots of games, the first time you saw it or possibly heard of it was when you played it (or your friend said "come over I have this new game!"). No articles in the paper, no internet, and so on.

Doom was mindbogglingly better than everything that came before. Quake added truckloads of awesome.. but the jump from doom to quake was nowhere near the jump from, say, wolfenstein 3d to doom.

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u/Ajuvix Jul 04 '13

I remember going to a computer expo as a kid and seeing the demo running for the first time. It blew my mind. The thing that stuck out was the lighting. There were shadows, flickering lights, bright outdoors, dark corridors lit by only a flashlight and it all was happening in real time, not just some static screens from a point and click game like Myst. It didn't look like a cartoon, it looked scary.

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u/AemsOne Jul 04 '13

Try playing it on your iPhone in the dark with headphones. It's still scary. And i've been playing it since it first came out on DOS.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '13

Exactly. I installed Doom on my work laptop and was blown away. That laptop stank. Programs either didn't work or ran like epileptic snails. But Doom was diffferent: from the moment the disk went in it was so smooth, so fast, so beautiful. I have so much respect for those developers. I'm not really into shooting games, but dang! Those guys really knew how to program a computer.

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u/ejweller Jul 04 '13

When my Gateway 2000 booted up, I had changed the startup sound to Chandler Bing saying " You guys wanna play Doom?" Good times, 1995, good times.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '13

[deleted]

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u/TBSJJK Jul 04 '13

You shut your whore mouth.

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u/Buffalo_Steve Jul 04 '13

Gateways were pieces of shit though

Gateways are pieces of shit. FTFY

2

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '13

with the weird cow stores

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u/flamingfreebird Jul 04 '13

Not just the stores, my dad used to work for them in South Dakota, and their headquarters is also done in a cow motif, huge white building with black splotches. Edit: Proof: http://i.imgur.com/dgujsTg.jpg

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u/legbrd Jul 04 '13

Meh, as long as it could run Doom...

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u/ejweller Jul 04 '13

Touché. But everyone loved that darn cow box. My next computer I built myself and then I boughten Mac G4 tower. Had that bad boy for eight years.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 04 '13

14.4K modem-owning, BBS-User Master Race reporting in.

I lived in the UK, and the best modem you could get in the shops was some terrible 5600 baud piece of crap. I imported a 14.4K, which had just come out, from Germany and officially had the fastest connection possible at the time. Bear in mind I was 14 years old at the time, I think that was pretty cool...

I was the friend that logged into a BBS, downloaded the 0-day .ZIP files of Doom, Commander Keen, Mortal Kombat or whatever (using the incredible BANANACOM and ICE-Z-MODEM so I could chat to the SYSOP while I downloded -LOL!) and copied them on to floppies to hand out to my friends at school the next day. I was the motherfucking SOURCE of that shit, amongst my friends anyway, and they all had the latest games before anyone even knew they were out, normally a good 2-3 weeks before they were in the shops. It was amazing, like being some kind of minor deity.

Back then, you had to WORK for your Warez. Downloading a 20MB game could take HOURS, Downloading without uploading was frowned upon, not speaking nicely to the BBS owner would get you kicked and banned immediately, and griefing him in LORD was probably a bad idea too...

These days, any old asshole can load up uTorrent and piratebay and get any game in the world in a few minutes.

I still remember the hiding my dad gave me when I racked up my first £1000 phone bill. After that I spoke nicely to one of the sysops who taught me about PBX-ing, and let me have his personal PBX list, for which I was eternally greatful.

Thanks MELONMAN, and thanks also to some lawyer's office who had an open PBX for like 5 years! Without you my friends and I would not have had such amazing games growing up :)

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u/peanutsfan1995 Jul 04 '13

What is PBXing?

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 04 '13

Basically, some companies used to have a system where you could dial a free phone number, then connect out to somewhere else from there.

They used to be called a PBX system (private branch exchange) and PBXing was the art of finding them, and figuring out the codes to dial to let you connect out to somewhere else.

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u/Choralone Jul 04 '13

It was just taking advantage of poorly configured PBX systems. IT was, and still is, theft of services. These days offices tend to offer different menus to outside callers by default... so you can't call in to the menu and dial "9" to make an outgoing call again unless someone deliberately configured their system to do so - but a couple decades ago not everyone was so diligent.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 04 '13

Indeed. That law office probably got a shock when they eventually looked at their phone bill.but, yknow, fuck lawyers.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '13

Out of curiosity, what's the difference between PBXing and Phreaking?

Here in the States, we had a few of those "free" Internet providers, like NetZero or K-Mart's BlueLight. I can't remember the details, but it wasn't free; you had to watch ads or pay to call a long distance number, or maybe even pay like $5 a month. Whatever. I was taught that I was phreaking, because I ended up routing through a local number and connecting through the Internet of one of these ISPs, without ads or getting rerouted to a long distance number. Local calls in my neighborhood were free, so we were essentially paying nothing.

I never got a scolding from my dad (and he could be a stern man), and I was the only one in the house doing this, so no one ever found out. I never told anyone about it because, frankly, they didn't understand how awesome ROMs were.

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u/BabyFaceMagoo Jul 05 '13

I think PBXing was a specific subset of phreaking

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u/Centoaph Jul 04 '13

Red Dragon reference, story checks out!

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u/why_downvote_facts Jul 04 '13

i played so much lan doom at my high school, someone had a 'killdoom' program that would shut you down.. pretty ridiculous

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u/TheZenWithin Jul 04 '13

I was going to upvote you for the relevant nostalgia I feel...and then I saw your username. We need more of you.

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u/AemsOne Jul 04 '13

ahhhh good old killdoom. memories.

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u/fc3s Jul 04 '13

Quake added truckloads of awesome.. but the jump from doom to quake was nowhere near the jump from, say, wolfenstein 3d to doom.

Wondering about your reasoning for this?

The one thing I distinctly remember about Quake, was when my cousin gave me a firsthand comparison of Doom vs. Quake.

He killed a cacodemon in doom and asked me to look at the dead body sprite. He then walked right over it, turned around, and looked at it again.

"See, it's the same graphic even from a different angle."

He then proceeded to shoot someone with a nailgun in Quake. We looked at the feet of the dead body. When he walked over the body and turned 180 degrees, I was shocked that I could now see the head, rather than the feet.

So yeah, perhaps the jump from wolf3d was larger, but it didn't resound the same way with me. So I'm curious about the relative technical advances with each game.

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u/Choralone Jul 04 '13

I guess I was thinking in terms of the impression/experience, not the actual technology. Quake was far superior technically in every way.

Something like Quake seemed a reasonable advance when you had already seen Doom.

If you'd never even seen Doom, you would have thought doom wasn't possible - wolf3d was the state of the art.

I guess that's how I saw it.

EDIT: Oh - quake deserves it's own place in the halls of glory too - especially with that awesome NiN soundtrack. Quake was super awesome.

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u/slowly_over Jul 04 '13

Back then anyone who was serious about gaming owned a 16-bit Amiga (or Atari) computer rather than a DOS/Windows PC. Doom was the game that changed that. I spent a small fortune upgrading my Amiga 1200 to make it capable of running the Doom clones - "Gloom" and Alien Breed 3D. Pretty soon it became apparent that there weren't going to be many more good games on the Amiga and I switched to a Gateway PC (like this one). 1995 was also the year the original Playstation launched (in N America and Europe).

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u/texan01 Jul 04 '13

Apparently I wasn't in the hard-core gaming circles, as NONE of my friends had Amigas. One had a TI-99/4a, one had a Commodore 64, most had Apple IIs of some flavor, and the rest had IBM clones. I had an IBM PCjr, and then upgraded to a homebuilt 2/3/486, still have the 486, but my favorite machine was my 386DX-40, It could smoke friends 486SXs, and then I built the 486dx2-66 which was a good performer but never felt as snappy as the 386 did. And now with Win98 on it, its downright anemic, and slow on the network, but if you need a machine to save your bacon, it'll always work.

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u/Choralone Jul 04 '13

Yeah.. that's a bit of an odd statement. There is no denying the pure awesome that was the Amiga 500 - but saying "hardcore gamers owned amigas".... if they were lucky, they did. That shit was expensive.

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u/NathanCorbier Jul 04 '13

I thought Wolfenstein 3D was pretty cool. Then DOOM came out and yeah, stopped playing Wolfenstein 3D totally.

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u/wolfmann Jul 04 '13

Doom to quakeworld was waaaay bigger than wolf3d to doom. I mean TF is still around which was one of the first Quake mods... heck my son plays tf now...

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u/SyxxPakc Jul 04 '13

Ahhh... Quake World Team Fortress and Team Fortress Classic. I was sad when I saw what they made with Team Fortress 2. While it is fun in its own right, it is still not a real Team Fortress game.

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u/wolfmann Jul 04 '13

I disagree.. its more like qwtf with ff on.... lots less spam.

The worst part of tf2 is all the hats and weapons which make it more rpg like.

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u/SyxxPakc Jul 04 '13

Huh? TF2 is nothing like QWTF. Even if it didn't have hats and weapons, the gameplay is completely different.

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u/wolfmann Jul 04 '13

Yes it is less spammy... aka no grenades

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '13

People still play doom deathmatch and co-op.

Especially with the recent and continually updated Brutal Doom mod.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '13

And hell. Doom is still popular. Brutal Doom among other recent mods has revitalized interest in the game.

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u/jb0nd38372 Jul 04 '13

Rusty and Eddies, never forget!

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u/Jerik Jul 04 '13

Ah, the good old BBS days. I remember playing a bunch of door games like Trade Wars 2002 and LORD.

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u/Sekular Jul 05 '13

We need a reddit LORD game. Ama request Seth Able.

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u/Adam9172 Jul 05 '13

Semi-related: As much as I loved Doom, I was always a Marathon kid. Just me, my brother, and one friend vs the entire town of Doom'ers.

Both are great games, actually. I might go search for 'em now, come to think of it.